Or, “How to measure progress”.

Whatever you’re doing, and whatever you’re doing it for, you need a way to measure any progress you’re making in that direction. It’s not just something you do for the sake of bookkeeping. Having a visible indication of progress  helps you stay on track, especially in times when you don’t feel you’re making any visible progress. You may not be able to tell the difference just by looking, but numbers don’t lie.

Start by deciding what to measure. With some things, it’s easy. If you’re keeping track of body weight exercises, say push ups, you can just count how many you did, or how long it took you. If you did more, or the same amount faster than you did last time, you know you made progress. Easy.

Other areas might be trickier. Say your goal is slimming down, your first instinct would probably be to reach for your bathroom scale. That’s a trap. Your total body weight doesn’t have as much bearing on your size as your body composition does. For the sake of example, in the course of self experimentation, one of our guinea pigs wore size 34 trousers at 62kg. At weight 67kg, those trousers were looking like clown pants on him. Point is, lean tissue is a lot more dense than fat tissue, so if you go by weight alone, you’re just going to get the wrong conclusions. If your goal is to slim down, measure your size, not your weight.

Whatever you choose to measure, make sure it’s something you can measure every time. It would be good to have a full body scan, heart rates, body composition check and all that every time, but between the time that takes and the equipment you need, you’re really not going to keep that up very long. Random samples can work, but they’re a lot less accurate than continuous measurement. Keep it simple. Simple works.

Now, these records aren’t there simply for motivation and ego-stroking. Since you’re going to keep track of what you’re doing, you could as well use that information to improve your training. Say you add a new exercise to your routine. Did it produce any improvement towards your goal? If not, you can start thinking about replacing it or dropping it. Is the rate at which you’re progressing suddenly slowing down, or regressing? Might be time to change your routine – your body is probably getting so used to your current one that it doesn’t find it challenging any more.

All this may sound like a geek thing, but it’s something that most people who are serious about improvement take to heart. To give one example, Bruce Lee – hardly someone one would associate with geekdom – was a very diligent record keeper, and was constantly adding and removing elements to his training routine to make it more efficient based on the output he was recording. He trained with a goal, and any part of his training which was not moving him towards it was a waste of time he could have used to get closer to his goal, or doing something else entirely.

So: Measure, measure the right things, and make those measurements work for you.

Header image: Tape Measure © Pastorius /   Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License

Wan Kam Leung with Bruce Lee in a screen test for Game of Death Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License